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Mexico haunted by mystery of the ‘disappeared’

More than 26,000 Mexicans have vanished since 2006, a tide of disappearances police and other officials have failed to halt.

A woman holds up a sign with details of her recently disappeared relative during a protest in Mexico City, May 30, 2013. Twelve young people were kidnapped in broad daylight from a Mexico City bar.
(Eduardo Verdugo / ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Photo composite of images taken from flyers made by relatives showing 10 of the young people that were kidnapped in broad daylight from an after-hours bar in Mexico City on May 26.
(Marco Ugarte / ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Migrants ride on top of a northern-bound train toward the US-Mexico border in Juchitan, southern Mexico, Monday, April 29, 2013. Migrants crossing Mexico to get to the U.S. have increasingly become targets of criminal gangs who kidnap them to obtain ransom money. (Eduardo Verdugo / Associated Press)

“It’s a breakdown of law and order in Mexican society. People believe they can get away with anything, and they’re right.”

Duncan Wood

director of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington

The abduction took place in Mexico City, on a Sunday morning in May.

In all, 12 young people were taken.

One moment, they were here. A few minutes later, they were gone.

Despite initial reports, those who carried out the operation were not driving dark SUVs or disguised with masks — both giveaways of gang-related activity in Mexico — but arrived in unremarkable sedans, wearing casual clothing.

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The assailants numbered about 17. Their targets were all youths from an impoverished and crime-ridden Mexico City neighbourhood called Tepito, notorious for its huge outdoor market featuring all sorts of contraband goods.

At the time of the abduction, the victims were in a very different part of town — an upscale entertainment and nightclub district known as the Zona Rosa, where they were partying at an after-hours lounge called Heaven.

According to security camera footage, the abductees put up little if any struggle. They were simply bundled into a variety of waiting cars and driven away.

That was on May 26.

None of them has been seen since.

“It’s still a mystery,” says Ernesto Lopez Portillo, director of the Institute for Security and Democracy in Mexico City. “Every minute counts — above all, the first 72 hours. These are key to a resolution.”

But nearly a month has passed, and authorities are no closer to solving a case that has shocked people in Mexico’s largest metropolis, a city unaccustomed to such brazen crimes.

“This kind of thing has happened in Ciudad Juarez and Monterrey,” says Duncan Wood, a long-time resident of Mexico City and now director of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington.

He’s referring to two cities in northern Mexico that have suffered from severe drug-related violence in recent years.

But Mexico’s huge, teeming capital has been largely insulated from the security problems and gangland-style warfare that plague other parts of the country.

“Mexico City is a safer city than Washington, D.C.,” says Wood. “It’s much safer than Baltimore.”Gone without a trace

What happened in the Zona Rosa on May 26 was not formally a kidnapping, which typically entails a ransom note, a series of negotiations and a definite outcome, whether happy or sad.

The mysterious events on that Sunday in May were something else. They were a disappearance, or 12 disappearances — a dozen young people gone without a trace.

It turns out that the youths from Tepito are far from alone.

Earlier this year, the Mexican government headed by newly elected President Enrique Pena Nieto released information from a national database of desaparecidos — or disappeared people. Previously secret, the numbers indicate that at least 26,121 individuals vanished in Mexico between late 2006 and the end of 2012, a six-year period that coincides with an all-out war on drugs unleashed by former president Felipe Calderon.

“This has been pretty much a hidden issue in Mexico,” says Maureen Meyer, who’s a Mexico expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, a U.S. think-tank. “But now the (federal) attorney general’s office has owned up to it as a national tragedy.”

During the same six-year period, roughly 70,000 additional people are reckoned to have died in drug-related violence — not disappeared but died — slain either by the feuding drug cartels, or else by Mexican soldiers or police, or possibly by “disorganized” criminals, murderous felons using the central drug-fuelled fray as cover to settle scores.

In a recent report examining the ranks of Mexico’s desaparecidos, human rights monitor Amnesty International examined 152 individual cases of people who had vanished. The agency found that in at least 85 of these cases “there is sufficient evidence of the involvement of public officials for them to constitute crimes of enforced disappearance under international law.”

In other words, it was government agents — typically either soldiers or police — who were the likely abductors in more than half the cases examined by Amnesty International. No matter who they are, the perpetrators of such crimes are hardly ever held to account.

“Authorities have systematically failed to investigate and clarify the vast majority of cases, including the many hundreds of disappearances in which there is evidence of detention or abduction, whether by state agents or criminal gangs,” says the human rights watchdog.

The record is probably at its worst in cases where there is evidence of government involvement. Convictions have been recorded in only two such cases during the past six years, according to figures released by the federal attorney general’s office.

Climate of impunity

This combination of investigative and prosecutorial neglect has produced a pervasive climate of impunity, a sort of open invitation for wrongdoers to do wrong.

“It’s a breakdown of law and order in Mexican society,” says Wood. “People believe they can get away with anything, and they’re right.”

The severity of the problem varies by region. The most violent parts of Mexico are states on or near the U.S. border, including Tamaulipas, Chihuahua and Nuevo Leon, along with several central states, such as Guerrero and Michoacan, where feuds among drug gangs are particularly deadly.

But these things change. Formerly cauldrons of extreme violence, northern border cities such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez have calmed down significantly during the last couple of years, not as a result of government intervention but simply because one drug cartel has triumphed over another in a fight for territorial control.

Meanwhile, substantial areas of the country are largely peaceful. On the whole, Mexico is not a dangerous place, not for Mexicans and even less so for foreigners who steer clear of drugs.

“Mexico is a much safer country than Brazil,” says Wood. “It’s a much safer country than Colombia.”

Still, there are perils for some.

Human trafficking

Most of Mexico’s disappearances are probably related to the illegal narcotics industry in one way or another, but many are not.

The exceptions tend to involve migrants — mostly Mexicans, but also people from other Latin American countries or even farther way — all trying to sneak across the border to the United States, in search of employment.

Nowadays, the business of human trafficking in northern Mexico is mainly controlled by the same criminal organizations that supply the U.S. and Canada with cocaine and other narcotics, cartels that are diversifying into all sorts of illicit pursuits while retaining the same violent methods that got them where they are.

In one infamous case, 72 northbound migrants from Central and South America were executed in Tamaulipas state in August 2010 by thugs belonging to Los Zetas— a particularly ruthless cartel — apparently because they would not pay bribes or agree to work for the drug traffickers. The dead included 20 children.

In “normal” circumstances, the fate of these poor souls would never have been discovered. They would simply have vanished. But one man, an Ecuadorian, managed to escape and report what had happened, and so the massacre came to light.

In most cases involving disappearances, the families of the victims are left to conduct investigations on their own, possibly risking their lives, with no assurance that official agencies — overworked and largely incompetent — will ever take their cases seriously.

Lopez Portillo at the Institute for Security and Democracy blames “slow, bureaucratic procedures,” as well as chronic institutional divisions between police and federal prosecutors.

But Lopez Portillo professes a degree of optimism, if only because things can hardly get worse. “We have probably touched bottom,” he says. “I believe we can only get better. The problem is, this takes time.”

And time may already have run out for the legions of Mexican desaparecidos, including the 12 young people abducted last month in Mexico City, in a case that remains cloaked in mystery.

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